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December 2019 www.intellinews.com I Page 5
support services on the platform; and continue to grow and connect its strong pan-European member base.
“We want to enable people to sell faster and
buy from a wider pool of products than any other platform in Europe – and at the lowest possible cost to our members. We hold firm to our belief that making them happy will power the growth of our member base, and we look forward to investing in advanced technology to make our proposition even more powerful for them. This funding will therefore directly benefit our members, driving improvements in product, technology, support, trust, and safety solutions,” said Plantenga, according to the company’s statement.
The company was founded in Vilnius in 2008
by Milda Mitkute and Justas Janauskas. As its website explains, Mitkute was “confronting an increasingly common problem in modern Europe – wardrobe overload. Milda was moving house but had too many clothes to take with her. Justas offered help and built a website with Milda, to give away her clothes to friends. The platform quickly became a success and grew organically, at first without any marketing investment.” The company is now led by Plantenga and COO Mantas Mikuckas – TechCrunch reports that Plantenga was brought in by investors when the company came close to running out of money in 2016,
after which the business model was changed to make it cheaper for users to list their clothes and international expansion plans were scaled back.
Since then, the company says, it has successfully scaled its business across Europe and is well- positioned to accelerate this growth. It points out that revenue has increased fourfold over the past 17 months.
Secondhand first
"This investment underlines the growing consumer appeal of second-hand fashion worldwide, with a market opportunity estimated at €13bn across Europe,” Vinted’s statement says.
Estimates by bne IntelliNews, based on trading data from the Comtrade database, shows that countries across Central, Southeast and Eastern Europe imported a massive 593mn kilograms of used textiles, mainly clothing, valued at $771mn in 2017 – and that’s not counting locally sourced clothing sold by local companies and individuals via channels like Vinted.
Despite the arrival of international retail chains
in Central and Eastern Europe including western fast fashion giants Inditex, H&M and most recently Primark, as well as their Turkish rivals like LC Waikiki, the market for second-hand fashion is growing. This is partly because incomes in the region, albeit rising fast, are still low compared
to developed countries so while consumers want to emulate the lifestyles they see in western countries, in many cases they can’t yet afford new high quality items. Instead, they rely on imports of used goods from Western Europe,
the US and other developed economies. Even
the fast fashion seen as cheap and disposable
by western shoppers is relatively high priced for their counterparts in the East.
This has sustained the market for second-
hand clothing that started to thrive in the years immediately after the collapse of communism and experienced a dramatic growth spurt amid the boom of the mid 2000s. And unlike the markets for higher priced new consumer goods, demand for used clothing continued going strong through the international economic crisis and
– despite a dip in 2013 – has persisted in the last few years too.
On top of this, there is growing awareness of
the huge environmental footprint of the fashion industry, and more interest in sustainable fashion including vintage and second-hand.
Reflecting the way buying second-hand fashion is increasingly seen as a sustainable option rather than just a last resort for poor people, Vilnius city councillor Tomas Gulbinas tweeted: “Place for many successful #startups #Lithuania has its first